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So I was at the bookstore the other day and I just couldn’t keep myself away from the foreign language section.  In a weakened state of mind I nabbed these: For those of you who don’t read Japanese, those are beginning Swedish textbooks. It looks like I’ve made the commitment to start studying Swedish.  Yens [...]

My grandparents on my father’s side immigrated to America from Sweden in the 1920s. Many Americans are obsessed about their “roots”, being proud of having Irish or Italian or whatever heritage, even if they have no contact or relationship with the land of their ancestors. I don’t know why exactly, but it may be because [...]

Inspired partly by this article, Rikker at Thai 101 has posted a great article about how the Thais remember the months. I thought the Japanese had it easy, but the Thai way is much more elegant. In Rikker’s words: In Thai it’s extremely simple: the number of days is encoded directly into the names of [...]

The other day I was thinking about the words bullshit and horseshit. Where I am from, these words are used almost interchangably in situations where you think a statement or assertion is false, ridiculous, a lie, etc. I thought it was interesting that we have two very similar words to use in the same situation. [...]

Do you know which months have 30 days and which ones have 31? I don’t. At least not off the top of my head. If I need to know how many days are in a month, and there isn’t a calendar around, I use the knuckle-counting method. It’s not as fast as having them memorized, [...]

Chapter 5 of Fight Club is another scene from the testicular cancer support group. At the start of the scene Thomas, one of the members, is telling the group how his ex-wife had her first child (with her new husband). In English, we usually say that a woman “has” a baby and that the baby [...]

I mentioned a few days ago that I finished my first Japanese manga, Doraemon. Normally when I read something in Japanese, I input some sentences into my SRS. I didn’t do this with Doraemon. I was 500+ cards behind in my SRS and I wasn’t ready for more. Well, now my SRS is down to [...]

For Japanese, I use Anki as my SRS. It’s a great piece of software for studying Japanese. Here are a few reasons why: It guesses kanji (Chinese character) readings automatically. This saves me from having to manually type in readings. It has a lot of cool graphs and stats you can use to analyse your [...]

I finished my first Japanese comic (manga) last week. Most Japanese learners jump into manga pretty early, but I didn’t because comics aren’t that interesting to me. Everyone says they are good study aids though, so I finally gave in and bought the first book of Doraemon. To be honest, I wanted to get a [...]

Rikker at Thai101 has published a fascinating post about Thailand’s first printing press. The owner published a newspaper called the Bangkok Recorder, and advertisements seemed to confuse some of the readers. Here’s an excerpt: I, the owner of this newspaper, have heard that those who purchase the Bangkok Recorder wonder, “Why are so many things [...]